Opinion: A nursery closes—and Laytonville is the poorer for it

This is an opinion piece. We value the diverse opinions of our readers and we welcome robust, wide-ranging thoughts and ideas on subjects relevant to Mendocino County. The following opinion is not representative of The Mendocino Voice, its publisher, editor or staff. Opinion pieces can be sent to info@mendovoice.com.

Weathertop Nursery is closing. An icon of community in Laytonville, it’s one of three places where you knew you would run into everyone in town: Geiger’s, the feed store, Weathertop (and later, La Casona del Cielo, the town’s astonishingly wonderful Mexican restaurant). Weathertop was a full-service nursery, carrying totes of soil, bareroot fruit trees, roses, four-inch starts from, among others, Annie’s Annuals in Richmond, a huge range of fertilizers and potions, surgical gloves, pruners, bulbs, and thousands of bags of Happy Frog, Black Gold, 420, and so many more.

Yes, it catered to the growers. It catered to everyone. And back in the day, pretty much everyone was a grower, if only a few plants to pay the property taxes. That was possible back then.

When you went into Weathertop, you encountered strapping, cheerful young men who would throw seventy-pound bags of soil over each shoulder and stomp out to your car, making jokes all the way. And sixty-year-old grandmas tending the four-inch starts while they chatted about the best tomato varieties for sauce and how the price of canning equipment was “through the roof.” If you needed to fill up a hoop house with soil, a Weathertop truck would come out and dump a huge load of mushroom compost in your front yard, so you could fill wheelbarrows and trundle it to the back forty. At the store, the ever-irascible Jean-Marie would regale you about the truffle dogs he was training up in the hills. You could always get a hint about which tulip variety would return year after year.

It began in 1978 and populated countless yards in Laytonville with fruit trees, perennials, shrubs, and infrastructure. It employed hundreds of people, young and old. It held annual events where the latest fertilizer and soil merchants would ply their wares like the medicine show barkers of old. You could pick up samples of fancy bat guano or seabird guano – forget the environmental damage to caves or ocean rocks jutting into the sky. You would come away with a bag stamped with Weathertop’s pretty logo and trudge to your car blocks away because half the town was there. The other half was at church, maybe.

When legalization hit the ballot, everyone realized that it would have negative impacts locally. Some forecast doom and economic collapse. Such pessimists! People debated and voted against their own interests because in the end, a harmless weed should not be illegal. It was stupid and always had been. Let’s right the ship.

The ship was righted. The county immediately made things difficult with onerous steps to license growers that changed weekly but cost money each step. The state came in with even more onerous demands including bar codes and a portal that rarely worked. Every agency had its hand out.

Worse were the dispensaries. A buyer came to the house of a friend and offered her $300 a pound. When she balked, he told her that from now on, growers would only get 10% of sales if they were lucky. The rest would go to the dispensaries and taxes and licensing and lawyers and tax consultants. She told him he was cracked. At which he offered $250, an amount that might pay for the trimmers and buckers and nothing for her, or for the chicken manure and the bags of soil and the drying and even the plastic bags her beautifully manicured crop was stored in. She ended up composting that crop. And gradually the little people, often getting on in years, gave up and stopped growing.

Weathertop is closing. The growers provided a backstop for a healthy business that benefited everyone in town, those who worked there, those who dropped in for a pack of plant labels, those who debated about which cherry tree to buy or scored a little bag of dancing ladybugs for their gardens. The women at the sales counter were grim-faced. They will no longer have a job. Another bulwark of community is gone.